


the devil's left hand (a nagito komaeda backstory rewrite)

by nohebi



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing, Super Dangan Ronpa 2, if you squint - Fandom
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Animal Death, Child Neglect, Claustrophobia, Depression, Gen, Hijacking, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, Mutilation, Obsessive Behavior, Self-Hatred, i didnt even add shit to this and its still 3.5k, im sorry komaeda, it had to be done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23783566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nohebi/pseuds/nohebi
Summary: Nagito Komaeda(凪斗 狛枝)凪斗 - Calm Below the Dipper狛枝 - Lion-Dog Tree BranchesA regal name, befitting of the affluency of the family’s first and only son.(in which i rewrite komaeda's canon backstory with some added fun stuff)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 54





	the devil's left hand (a nagito komaeda backstory rewrite)

**Author's Note:**

> this fic uses some canon dialogue from his free time events, and while it was written to be gen if u want to see komahina crumbs in this go ahead!!

**Nagito Komaeda**

(凪斗 狛枝)

**凪斗** \- Calm Below the Dipper

**狛枝** \- Lion-Dog Tree Branches

A regal name, befitting of the affluency of the family’s first and only son. 

His room is bathed in white and shades of blue. His curtains are made of imported silk and every knob on every set of drawers is pure gold. In this room, his bright ginger hair sticks out like a sore thumb. It falls in waves and frames his warm, freckled face in a bob. He feels like an accessory to the room, like a feature wall to draw your eyes in closer, except, right now, he’s not being watched.

Being from such a wealthy lineage of people, Nagito had grown used to the sensation of eyes on him. He always had to be  _ enough. _ His parents were explicit about that. They had a reputation, and if he didn’t sit pretty in the family photos it would be ruined. He’d ruin everything his parents had built. At home, he’d stay quiet and out of sight in his room. It offered everything to him and yet he still felt so alone when he spent his evenings staring at the ceiling. To fill the void, he’d clean. Speaking to the maids, they taught him how to make his already spotless room sparkle. 

_ “Nobody’s ever complimented me! Not even my own mother!” _

Sometimes, Nagito wondered what his parents thought of him. Were they proud? Did they even remember he existed, when he disappeared to his room and pretended he couldn’t hear them laughing over champagne through the walls? He’d seen so many of their expressions, but the only eyes that ever looked at him seemed to be cold. Still, he got whatever he asked for. Including Shishi, the beautiful, white-gold dog that slept at the foot of Nagito’s bed and pressed his nose into his palm when the nights got too cold.

If Nagito’s room was his shrine, then Shishi was his lion-dog. He was twice his size and even at age five Nagito could make fists in his thick fur. His eyes were dark, but bright, and always made it seem like he knew exactly how he was feeling. Some nights, when Nagito felt particularly alone, and not even the repetitive motions of scrubbing his desks could help him escape, he could wrap his arms around his lion-dog and cry into the thick curls around his neck. 

Shishi couldn’t always be there, though. Often, Nagito found himself in big, fancy events his family ran. He was there, as always, as an accessory. He couldn’t stand the crowds- they were noisy and he felt too closed in. Every time, he’d escape to the sidelines, but with no dog to comfort him, he’d sit with his hands over his ears. Occasionally, however, another child would join him, with big red eyes made to look almost comical by the glasses sitting on his nose. They’d talk, or play, in hushed tones, but never for long before one or both of them were being dragged away.

He never seemed to manage to catch his name.

_ “I haven’t seen him in ages.” _

There comes a morning where everything seems to be going a little too well. Nagito woke up to the sun on his face and the sensation of his palm being licked, and he reached out to pet Shishi’s big, floppy ears. Breakfast was calm and quiet. The floor to ceiling windows of the Komaeda household flooded the rooms with a pleasant warmth, and Nagito’s mother suggested he take Shishi for a walk.

As he wanders their neighbourhood, Shishi trailing behind him and off his lead, Nagito ponders. His head is full of questions typical of a five year old. Why do his freckles show more in the sun? Why did he recieve his mother’d red hair, and not his father’s dark locks instead? What made his eyes green? How could the birds tell when it was spring, if they didn’t have calendars?

His feet carry him down roads and through golden gates. The paths they take are immaculate, and Nagito wonders who’s job it is to make sure there are no cracks in the pavement. Every question he has, he speaks aloud to dog on his heels.

Without looking, he steps into the road.

Looking back on it, Nagito should’ve realised the moment he’d heard the screech of tires and the smell of burning rubber, that something was about to hit him. He hadn’t had time to react, and by the time he knew what was happening all he could do was freeze in place and brace for impact.

And impact came. In the form of Shishi, shouldering him out of the path of an incoming truck.

Nagito tumbles onto the other side of the road and looks up just in time to watch his beloved pet, his lion-dog, crumple and squish beneath the tires of the truck he’d so narrowly avoided. His ears ring with the sickening crunch of his bones and the strangled yelp of pain Shishi makes upon collision. He stumbles over to where he lies in the middle of the road, gagging at the smell of blood that fills his nose and covering his mouth when he sees the canyon of a tire mark left in Shishi’s side. 

His hands find their way into matted and sticky golden fur, and a scream rips his way from his throat. Desperately he grasps at the dog’s face, hot tears scalding his cheeks as he tries to elicit some kind of a response. It’s futile, he knows, but he just can’t let go. He has nothing else. When it finally sinks in that those dark eyes will never stare lovingly at him again, he collapses over Shishi’s corpse, burying his nose in his fur and sobbing until his throat is so sore he coughs up blood.

The police have to drag him away from the body, kicking and screaming. And that night, for the first time in his life, Nagito’s mother holds him while he cries.

  
  
  
  


_ “What do you think good luck is?” _

_ “Is it… an absolute power?” _

_ “Precisely! For me, that's exactly what good luck is! _

_ Regardless...it's a power that has terrible results due to the fact that I can't wield it with my own will.” _

_ “An absolute power you can't wield with your own will...? Isn't that a dangerous thing to have?” _

  
  


At eight years old, Nagito’s life is much the same. There’s a little more pressure on him now, the eyes watching his every move are a little harsher in their judgement. But at the end of every charity gala, after every day of staring at foreign letters and learning about his father’s investments, Nagito still spends every evening in his room, staring at the ceiling. 

He’s been alone there for two years, now. He doesn’t even feel the chill from his open window anymore. He can’t remember the feeling of warm fur pressed against his side. He thinks he might cry if he tries.

He blames himself for it. If only he hadn’t gone on that walk. If only he hadn’t walked into the road, if only he was better. If he was enough. If only, if only, if only. Stupid, stupid Nagito. 

Nobody seemed to notice how worse off he was. Nobody except the boy with the red eyes and the glasses, who took his hand and asked with more kindness than Nagito had ever experienced in his life if he was okay. Of course, he should have realised that even that amount of genuine kindness was too good to be true for someone like him.

When Nagito wandered into the woods to avoid yet another huge crowd, the kid followed, and by the time he’d returned to his parents he had forgotten that anyone was with him at all.   
  


He learned his name for the first time on a missing poster. 

But if he was sad, nobody noticed. Nobody knew that they’d been friends, hesitant as he was to use that word, at all. He saw their parents’ grief over his disappearance. He wondered if it was genuine. He wondered, for a while, if his parents would care if the same happened to him. The answer hurt to think about. Nagito loved his parents dearly, as distant as they were to him. If they held any affection for him at all, they seemed to only show it via gifts.

This time, they were taking him on their holiday to San Cristóbal Island, in the Galápagos. They claimed it was for the best, that blue sea and white sand could cure a child’s melancholy better than any shrink. For the most part, they were right. He was too taken with sprawling, green-covered mountains and water so clear he could see every scale on the fish to remember the constant low mood he maintained in Japan.

It’s too good to be true. It’s always too good to be true.

The trip home was supposed to be reflective. He was supposed to be full of satisfaction, excited to go home and rest after having fun for the first time in months. The plane was high class, the food cart was fancy and full of snacks Nagito couldn’t pronounce the name of. A passenger in the back had been eyeing him and his parents since the moment they had boarded. He may not have been the biggest social butterfly of a child, but he was intuitive. Something was wrong with how he looked at them.

Slowly, the man at the back of the plane stood up. He staggered towards the front of the plane- his gait was awkward and lopsided, as if recently injured. Nagito noted the way his left foot dragged slightly behind him. His hands were large and bony and stood out against the dark of his long coat as he reached inside of it. The hand paused, as if resting on something Nagito couldn’t make out the outline of behind the fabric. A flight attendant tried to ask him what he was doing, only for her to be thrown to the ground with a gun pointed at her. 

He declared in a voice rough from one too many cigarettes that he was hijacking the plane. All the passengers were to hand over any personal belongings, such as wallets and phones. Nagito came up empty handed, but his parents refused to obey. The gun in the man’s hand pointed at his mother’s forehead. Nagito was suddenly glad to have been sitting on his own behind them, even if the thought made him feel horrible.

He heard the click of the gun, but no gunshot came. Instead, his ears were met with the sound of shouting and metal being torn apart. Suddenly, he was breathless. The pressure in the plane had changed dramatically, and everyone was shouting. Peeking into the aisle, he saw the corpse of the hijacker sprawled on the floor, head crushed under the same rock as what looked to be his mother and father. He didn’t have time to feel ill. The words ‘emergency landing’, ‘crash’ and ‘brace yourselves’ registered in his mind, but the sudden cold air and the loss of oxygen had his head spinning. His eyes closed just as his stomach lurched.

_ “If everything that's happening now seems like bad luck, it's all going to result in good luck in the end. _

_ As long as I exist, that will definitely happen.” _

It’s a cold, drizzly april when- for a week- Nagito Komaeda disappears. Despite it only being 5 years since Nagito had found himself an elementary student with a mansion to himself, the name Komaeda has fizzled out of the public eye. Nobody looks for him when he’s snatched on his way home. While the blinding spring sun had done nothing to combat the cold, cloudless air, it warmed the black bag he’d been stuffed into, and he kicked and screamed until it was too hot to anymore.

When he wakes up, he’s on his side on the ground. His arms and legs are tied. His limbs press awkwardly against the concrete, aching as if he’d been there a while already. If he angles his eyes right, he can see the floor below his face is stained brown. It smells like copper. Even at twelve years old Nagito recognises the smell, and has to breathe through his mouth to avoid being sick with realisation.

The door creaks open and his kidnapper slinks into the room without a care in the world. Nagito figured he was a high school student, by the way his uniform sat on his shoulders and his tie hung loose around his neck. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a knife gripped in his bony hand. 

  
The knife is quickly put to his throat, close enough that Nagito is scared to breathe. He’s so small compared to the man that he could end his life in an instant. Instead, the hand moves suddenly, yanking his head up and hacking off a chunk of ginger hair. The hold on his hair is released, his head hits the concrete, and Nagito’s world begins to spin. He’s vaguely aware of a red light blinking in the corner of his vision. 

The man steps back- two agonizingly slow steps before he’s kicked in the ribs and what’s left of the air in his lungs escapes him.

The red light almost seems to mock him when he feels himself drifting out of consciousness.

With each passing day, between the ransom videos (Nagito was now missing a few fingernails) and the rare moments he was fed, Nagito reads. He reads the news clippings on the wall. He learns about talented people, about the hope they feed into the world. Right now, in this cold little room, hope sounds.. Nice. He imagines it to be fuzzy. Exciting. How must it feel to be talented enough that people look for you?

How must it feel to have hope that someone, somewhere out there cares if you die?

On Sunday, Nagito runs out of fingernails. 

He’d mentioned it, when he first woke up. Nobody would come save him- no matter how much of him they’d took. His fingertips are bloody and raw, now, and he can’t say he’s surprised by the outcome, as much as it hurts.

Of course, someone like him never deserved to hope for rescue. The man with the knife walks back in, and Nagito can do nothing but beg for his life. It’s pathetic really, the way his voice pitches up with distress, how it’s scratchy from disuse. Even to someone holding him hostage like this he manages to be polite. 

The serial killer scoffs at him. Swears. It makes Nagito flinch. How could he be the only twelve year old on the planet with absolutely no-one?   
Somehow those words hurt worse than the ache of his nailbeds.

Nagito begs again, offers to get the man the money he wants, anything not to have his life cut short here. Again, he’s knocked out. He was sure that time would be the last. 

He wakes up in darkness. Everything’s too close- there’s plastic stuck to his skin and he can hardly breathe. He spots a hole in the plastic, frantically reaching and scrambling at the surface until it tears open and he comes tumbling out into the street.

Nagito’s first reflex is to gasp for air. His hands burn, his face is wet with tears and he spends a good few seconds trying to feel human again. There’s drizzle in the air, and his hair starts to stick to his face.

In front of him, shielded by his body from the rain, is a slip of brightly coloured paper covered in lottery numbers. He knows the chances are slim, and that he doesn’t need the money anyway, but he pockets the paper nonetheless.

On Monday he walks to school with his hands wrapped in bandages and his hair cut short.

  
  


_ “I wanted to hear the rest what you were going to say earlier.” _

_ “It's no big deal anyway. _

_ Like I said before, my parents are dead. _

_ Since I had no other relatives, ‘it’ took direct action against me.” _

  
  


Nagito is fifteen, nearly sixteen. As of late, he’s been acting strange. Well, stranger than usual. Since being dumped out on the streets he’d been dedicating himself to the idea of hope. Hope, now, was all he had going for him. When all is lost, and Despair begins to rot the Earth away like a disease, hope would spring forth from the ashes like a phoenix. This much he knew. 

And if you only knew that much about his beliefs, you’d find that pretty understandable.

But he’d grown, with time, obsessive. As his luck’s body count grew higher with time, he fell deeper into this philosophy. He began to idolise Hope’s Peak academy and all it stood for. When that wasn’t enough, he idolised its students. He collected facts about each of them, their talents, pictures. That wasn’t enough. He collected their addresses, took his own pictures, joined forums. He shut himself inside for days on end, avoiding the world, not hurting anyone else and just losing himself in the safe haven of his new ideology. 

When he attended school, an expensive place named Spiral High, he was cast out for his… quirks. He saw the talentless as less than human, himself included, and was blatantly aggressive towards his peers. When he tried to spread his ideas he was met with mockery, and the hatred for the average festered.

He spent each and every day just waiting to die, wanting to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the world. Becoming a stepping stone was his only aspiration. He’d thought out long, elaborate ways to die in which he would become a symbol of hope, in his own way. Just the concept of helping the light of an Ultimate shine brighter was enough to make him tremble.

He forgot, largely, about hygiene and self-maintainance. He ate only what he ordered in, never cooked, never found the time between his planning to shower or fix his hair. It grew out, long and messy.

  
  
  
  


_ “What does ‘it’ mean...?” _

_ “My diagnosis.” _

  
  


Nagito, 16 for sure, now, sits in a doctor’s office. He twirls his hair in his fingers, and notices dully how its paled. His skin, pale and dry with dehydration, barely shows any of the old freckles that used to litter it like stars in the night sky. He’s hyperaware of the lump on his neck, and keeps trying to scratch it. This is just his luck.

The doctor looks at him like he pities him. He’s sick of being looked at like that by people just as pathetic as him. Nagito had been avoiding being here. 

But as the doctor speaks, showing him papers and reports and using long words he hasn’t come across in his neglected studie, perhaps Nagito becomes anxious, as well. But it explained it all. His recent fatigue, his lack of self care, his aggressive behaviour. It makes a little too much sense. 

He’s got six months. Oh, God, he’s going to die alone.

  
  


_ “Stage 3 malignant lymphoma, and to top it off...it's accompanied by frontotemporal dementia.” _

_ “...Huh?” _

_ “Even now...my brain is deteriorating bit by bit while I'm speaking to you…”  _

  
  


Nagito turns a letter back and forth in his hand, the Hope’s Peak Academy insignia emblazoned across the front and in the wax seal keeping it so elegantly together. How many times now, has he turned them down? They’re so insistent. Of course they’d be. 

If they’d want to investigate anyone’s luck, it would be his. But he’s terrified of accepting it. Terrified of his luck harming the ultimates he loves so much. Terrified that he’s going to accept and drop dead before he can do anything meaningful.

He sends the letter back.

_ “I have no parents, no siblings, no relatives... Not even friends or acquaintances... _

_ Because of my self-righteous thoughts, everyone distanced themselves from me.  _ _  
  
_

_ I was fine with that while I was still healthy, but it's quite lonely to die alone... _

_ Now that I'm on the verge of death, I've finally realized what I wanted all along: somebody's love. _

__  
  


_...I read a book about something like that the other day.” _


End file.
